Wireline and wireless Internet protocol (IP) networks have traditionally supported a best effort delivery of all traffic. To support enhanced services, multiple types, or classes, of services have been established and assigned certain class of service (CoS) parameters that manage queues for each service type.
The CoS parameters include delay, jitter, error rates, and throughput. The CoS parameters can be provisioned on a per IP connection or per flow basis through mechanisms such as resource reservation protocol (RSVP) or can be provisioned on aggregate flow which are classified into service classes. As the customer's CoS increases, so do the resources available to a customer's communications sessions thereby improving the customer's data performance. Internet service providers (ISPs) can utilize the service classes, their associated CoS behavior and CoS provisioning to provide tiered service offerings to their business and consumer customers.
Typically, a customer purchases a service policy or Service Level Agreement (SLA) that associates a CoS with his communication sessions. Data traffic in excess of the allocated bandwidths for a CoS is held or dropped causing delay and/or retransmissions. Consequently, as the CoS becomes congested, the customer's ability to utilize the CoS resources deteriorates.